Tropical depression heads for region ravaged by Myanmar cyclone

May 12, 2008|By Los Angeles Times

KYAIKTAW, Myanmar -- U Maung Saw and his family are in a race against the rain.

Tropical Cyclone Nargis pounded their house as flat as the mud where the broken pieces now lie. A 5-foot wave, driven by a storm surge that rolled 20 miles upriver from the Andaman Sea, crashed onto his doorstep. It washed away almost everything the family of seven owned -- even the fish they were farming in a nearby pond.

The flooding and torrential rain May 3 also ruined a fifth of the unmilled rice they had stockpiled since harvesting the paddy from the rich soil of the Irrawaddy River Delta, Myanmar's rice bowl, in late March. A week after the storm, the rest of the rice is so damp that it has to be spread out on the mucky ground to dry slowly in the sun before it rots, too.

And therein lies the problem: A nasty tropical depression is bearing down on southern Myanmar. And in countless villages such as this, where no one has received outside aid, the clock is quickly counting down to what threatens to be the next disaster.

Despite intense foreign pressure on Myanmar's military regime to open the reclusive Southeast Asian nation to an international relief operation, the generals continued Sunday to block most foreign aid.

Weak from the lack of adequate food and avoiding using a bad leg, Maung Saw, 58, isn't waiting for help to arrive.

With a hand from his sons, he works from dawn until dusk, rebuilding their house from scratch, getting what strength he can from meals of boiled rice and white melon.

Even without a house, the family is better off than most neighbors. So Maung Saw and his sons are helping those less fortunate as they seek to hold out against the coming rain long enough for relief operations to begin.

"The government never gives us anything," he says, laughing. "We're not angry. We're not surprised. We don't expect anything else." Kyaiktaw lies about 20 miles north of the Andaman Sea on the banks of the Bogalay River, one in a web of waterways that make up the fertile Irrawaddy Delta.

In the center of the 1,000-resident town, Ma San San Lwin and her husband have taken shelter in the dirt-floored sitting room of their boss, who pays them to weave palm fronds into roof thatch.

With rice prices soaring, they can't afford to buy enough to eat, so they depend on daily donations from villagers such as Maung Saw. It's not so much the model of self-reliance and discipline the military regime has hammered into its people for decades, but more a sad realization that the generals can't be counted on to rescue their country from catastrophe.

"They are very selfish," says one villager, leaning on a thin bamboo pole for strength. "They don't care what happens to others. They only think about themselves."

The only way into or out of the village is by boat, and with shortages driving up the price of fuel, few can afford to go far. Maung Saw uses his boat to travel upriver to a lake for drinking water.

The storm that destroyed the village blew with an oscillating wail; Maung Saw says it was a noise like none he had ever heard before. The closest sound he could think of was a jet plane, but Nargis howled much louder than that.